Your message dated Mon, 15 Jan 2007 01:04:56 +0100
with message-id <200701150105.25766.elendil@planet.nl>
and subject line Bug#406785: sort: incorrect result when sorting on subfields
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Package: coreutils
Version: 5.97-5
Whilst testing a patch for Busybox sort, I encountered this bug in GNU
sort.
$ sort -k4.2,4.4 test
999 3 0 algebra
egg 1 2 papyrus
7 3 42 soup
42 1 3 woot
42 1 010 zoology
$ sort -k4.3,4.5 test
egg 1 2 papyrus
999 3 0 algebra
42 1 010 zoology
42 1 3 woot
7 3 42 soup
In the first example, sort should, according to the info page, take the
second to fourth character of the fourth field, but instead it sorts on
the first letter.
Only if the character limits are increased by one do I get the correct
result.
I suspect that a delimiter character (space?) is included at the start of
the string and that that is counted as the first character.
Cheers,
FJP

Closing as this is not a bug in current busybox.
The reason this is not a bug is explained in the GNU sort info page for
the -t option:
`-t SEPARATOR'
`--field-separator=SEPARATOR'
Use character SEPARATOR as the field separator when finding the
sort keys in each line. By default, fields are separated by the
empty string between a non-blank character and a blank character.
That is, given the input line ` foo bar', `sort' breaks it into
fields ` foo' and ` bar'.
Note the leading spaces in the last line in the case that no separator is
used. Not really intuitive, but well.
(Using the -b option fixes the issue.)